NYTimes ran an interesting article on paternity leave just as I was returning from my unpaid time off spent with my baby. It doesn’t say anything specific about university professors, but may be of interest to others on this list anyway: http://nyti.ms/1pvfxba

All fields have their quirks in publication style. Today I’m thinking about statistics, because I’ve been asked to explain something about survey weights to our post-bachelor’s fellows. There is a nice paper on the matter by Andrew Gelman, which starts strong, with first sentence “Survey weighting is a mess.” Start like that, and you’re sure to get a response from survey statisticians, who (at least I imagine) think of themselves as about as tidy as it comes.

The quirk in stats publications that I’m thinking of today is the Comment/Rejoinder format, wherein an article was published together with responses from several statisticians who don’t all agree with the article, and then a response from authors of the article. This is cool.

Unfortunately, Google scholar hasn’t kept up with this format, and searching for the paper title Struggles with Survey Weighting and Regression Modeling found me just one of the five comments. Project Euclid hasn’t kept up either, with only a tiny link from the article to the table of contents from the journal it appeared in. And thus I was forced to follow the obscure links in the pdf of the article to find the comprehensive list, which I’m putting here in case I need to find them all again sometime.
Statistical Science, Vol. 22, No. 2: Article/Comments/Rejoiner on Survey Weights